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Roaming around Austin during SXSW is a perfect way to stumble into discoveries. One such find this year was the Nordic Lighthouse—a showcase of Nordic startup tech, cinema, music, food, and design. Lucky for me Simon Stålenhag, the author of Tales From The Loop, was part of that showcase. I managed to get some time where he talked about inspiration, Swedish countryside, the eighties, why his dad's bedtime story was Alien, and poetry.

Comixology will once again be making a big splash (although hopefully not the same kind as they amde last year)at the SXSWi interactive conference which runs March 7-11. Activities will encompass: sponsoring the SXSW Geek Stage; a special panel; happy hour; free comics offered throughout the event; and handing out $150,000 worth of $5 Amazon Appstore credits toward comiXology content at comiXology’s SXSW Gaming Expo booth #125 & 127.

“SXSW Interactive brings together some of the biggest names in video games, comics and entertainment and we’re proud to power the stage that will see them strut their stuff,” said comiXology co-founder & CEO David Steinberger in a statement. “We’ve also got some great things for our fans including our awesome – and free to attend – panel as well as a free happy hour, booth giveaways and more!”

Here is a list of all the comiXology events and giveaways at SXSW Interactive:

SXSW Geek Stage powered by comiXology:

Friday, March 7 – 1:00 PM – 9:00 PM
Saturday & Sunday, March 8 – 9 – 12:00 PM – 8:00 PM
SXSW Gaming Expo – Palmer Events Center, Exhibit Hall 1
900 Barton Springs Rd, Austin, TX 78704

Get a front row seat and hear the latest on comiXology’s social channels throughout the weekend. (Free digital comics and graphics novels too!)

Follow the action on comiXology’s Twitter, Tumblr & Facebook.

Panel:

ComiXology: Take Comics Further
Saturday, March 8 – 4:30PM - 5:15PM
SXSW Gaming Expo – The Geek Stage

Free & open to the public! Top grossing digital comics platform comiXology electrifies the SXSW GEEK Stage in this not-to-be-missed event! Join comiXology’s David Steinberger (co-founder & CEO) & John D. Roberts (co-founder) and moderator Chip Mosher as they unveil the next big thing for digital comics and graphic novels.

Happy Hour:

SXSW Happy Hour Presented by comiXology
Saturday, March 8 – 5:00pm to 6:00pm
SXSW Gaming Expo – Near The Geek Stage

Right after the panel, enjoy a Texas-size beer with the comiXology crew as they celebrate another year at SXSW!

Booth & Giveaways:

ComiXology SXSW Gaming Expo Booth #125 & 127Join us at Booth #125 & 127 where we’ll be giving demos of the comiXology platform, and we’ll also be giving away $5 gift credits good for digital comics purchases on the Amazon appstore.

Today's Ypulse Youth Advisory Board post comes from Libby who reports back from SXSW Interactive on some of the youthier insights gleaned, trends spotted and more! Remember  you can communicate directly with any member of the Ypulse Youth Advisory... Read the rest of this post

So, I may have mentioned earlier that this is the month I’m away giving talks and talking to librarians instead of typing on my blogonet. I’m partway done. I’ve been to Florida and Alaska and Austin Texas and I’ll be stopping by Portland Oregon next week and then I’m pretty much done. I’ve done a few talks you’ve maybe heard before but the biggest news is the panel that NYPL’s Jenny Engstrom and I did at SXSW on Tuesday. It was called How The Other Half Lives: Touring The Digital Divide [link goes to our slides] and it was a look at how libraries are dealing with people on the other side of the digital divide.

Some of this is stuff you’ve heard before but some is newish. We were lucky enough to give our presentation after the FCC released the results of their broadband study but before they actually released their Broadband Plan, so there was a lot to talk about but not too much to fight about. The talk was well-attended, well-tweeted and folks asked a lot of questions and stuck around to talk more. I’ve just gotten back from Texas so I’ll save more links and discussions for a little later. Thanks to everyone who showed up and who supported us in our desire to get this talk on the roaster at SXSW. I think we gave people a lot of food for thought.

Today we're bringing you our monthly roundup of cool youth media and marketing events you or your company may want to attend. If your company hosts an event relevant to the youth media or marketing space that you'd like us to highlight, email... Read the rest of this post

Fresh from the wire, I'm excited to update Ypulse readers on how this year's Ypulse Youth Marketing Mashup event is unfolding. We are thrilled to announce Neil Howe, President, LifeCourse Associates, yes, the Neil Howe who coined the phrase "The... Read the rest of this post

I have proposed two presentations for the SXSW conference in Austin Texas next March. There is a complicated series of steps to determining which of the proposals will actually get picked. Part of this determination (30%) is a very basic voting thing where you can thumbs-up or thumbs-down a particular presentation. Voting is now open. We are encouraged to use our powers of persuasion to get you to vote for our ideas. I would like you to vote for my ideas. Here is a link to all of the proposals. There are over 2000 of them and 300 or so will get chosen.

My two proposals are linked here

- How The Other 1/2 Lives – Touring The Digital Divide
- Curating Cultural Content – Libraries Save Your Ass & Etchings

Voting involved signing up on the website and then clicking the thumbs up. I’d appreciate it if you’d consider doing this. I’m pretty into both topics but the first one is nearer and dearer to my heart, while the second one seems to fit in more nicely with the SXSW gestalt. A few other library-themed things you shoudl check out

- David Lee King presenting on Designing Your Customers Digital Experience
- Heath Rezabek’s Connected Youth: Austin Public Library Teens Get Mobile
- Cecily Walker’s Can I Reserve This Book With My iPhone?
- Jason Schultz’s Reading ReInvented: Can You Steal this Book?
- Tiffini Travis’s Librarian Glasses or Stripper Heels about information fluency.
- Brian Rowe’s Digital Accessibility on Ebooks and Phones : #$@^ Kindle
- Bill Simmon is also proposing a panel which I may be on: Hyperlocal Focus: Growing A Vibrant Community Media Ecosystem

And a few presentations about books more generally…

- Allen Weiner’s Publishers Look To E-Reading to Reach Digital Consumers (curious about this one)
- Travis Alber’s The Future of Reading: Books and the Web
- Dharmishta Rood’s Networked Reading: Viewing as an Act of Participation
- Aaron Miller’s Books and the Twenty-First Century – The New Realm of Reading
- Bradley Inman’s Too Busy To Read? The Future Of Books
- Two related seeming panels: Kindle 2020 and The Book in 2050

Please vote early and often and for as many ideas as you like. There are a lot of great ideas in there on related topics like gaming and accessibility and web standards. Even if you’re not even considering going to SXSW, please take some time to vote up ideas you think should be getting exposure at a web geeks conference. Thanks.

appy news! I was invited to be a panelist at the South by Southwest Interactive conference next month, as part of their ScreenBurn track. I’m on a panel called “Funologists live and in person: Guerilla Game Research.”

I’ll share my experience starting some low-budget user research cycles for Second Life, and my work translating those frustrating observations into shippable engineering requirements.

There will be pretty pictures, and possibly cake.

The cake is a lie, but you should stop by anyway. There could be cake.

There certainly won’t be cake and not cake. Not at the same time, I can assure you.

Hi. It’s been a while. I was out of town at the SXSWi conference in Austin Texas. I was on a panel and hung out for a few days on either end. I went to a few libraries while I was out there. I also got to spend some time with David King who was the only other librarian I crossed paths with besides the gals at the librarian meetup which I missed because it overlapped with the MetaFilter meetup. David and I took in the exhibit floor and spent some time trying to explain to vendors why they might want to exhibit at a library conference.

I talked about “user revolts” on the panel I was on which included Gina from LifeHacker, Jeska from SecondLife and Annalee from io9 and many other locations in the blogoverse and elsewhere. The notes for my seven minute talk are here, just some backgrounder on MetaFilter and a timeline of some things that happened. I was surprised how many people who are newer at managing online communities (I’ve been working at MeFi since early 2005) were still grappling with how to deal with comments and user civility issues. I got to talk to people at Dogster and YouTube about what works and what doesn’t work to keep things under control. I also got to hang out with a lot of my “old school” blogger friends — where old school means you started your blog last century — and catch up with a lot of people who rarely come to my neck of the woods.

There were keynote talks by Mark Zuckerberg from Facebook (which went quite badly, check YouTube or the blogs for specifics), Frank Warren from PostSecret and Jane McGonigal from The Institute for the Future. Henry Jenkins and Steven Johnson gave opening remarks and talked a lot about how the nature of information and how we learn is changing and how we are shifting towards “lifestyle democracy” towards openness in more of our lives and shared experiences. It was good food for thought, especially as I tangle with tech issues and the digital divide here at home.

And, there was Twitter. When I’m at home, I like to keep an eye on Twitter because I like feeling there are other people working when I’m working, and I like to keep up with Libraryland and Bloggertown and my sister and random internet celebs in small doses. When the Eliot Spitzer news hit, I heard about it on Twitter first. Twitter told me when the parties I was walking towards were already filled to capacity. And, when I left my camera in a hotel lobby my friend who found it Twittered that he’d left it at the desk within ten minutes of me noticing it was missing. Now I’m home where my cell phone doesn’t work and catching up on news and bird feeding and teaching a Getting Started with Excel class. I’m heading to Michigan on Monday to give a talk at a Teaching Technology in Libraries workshop and then turning back around where I’ll be home in Vermont for most of the rest of the month. My Austin photoset is here and includes many nifty library shots (oooh Gutenberg) in addition to the standard “this is me at the hotel bar drinking with geeks” sorts of things.

I’m putting together a few more posts, one about SWIFT and one with the links I’ve seen that were worth a mention over the past week. I realize this blog is sometimes turning into “hey I was gone and now I’m back again but I’m leaving soon…” and I’ll try to do something about that.